This invention relates to a dot printing device having a function of printing italic characters.
The printing head of a dot printing device generally has N head pins arranged in a row. During printing, these head pins are moved at a contant speed in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the row and also selectively energized according to dot data corresponding to characters to be printed by a character generator. Sometimes, some of the characters to be printed are printed in the italic form to signify phrases to be noted or foreign language words. In the prior art, the memory capacity of the character generator has to be increased in order to permit generation of italic characters from the character generator. In this case, the italic characters are confined to 9-dot by 9-column character size, so that the shape of printed italic characters is rather inferior. In addition, an inclined line cannot be printed as a straight line.